[Reader-list] Uncreative Writing

[Vivek Narayanan]

http://poetryfoundation.org/dispatches/journals/2007.01.22.html
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I hadn't read this blog before the remix workshop, but it might be 
interesting to read in light of those issues, re: text.

Kenneth Goldsmith is one of the more somewhat interesting conceptual 
poets, and also also the big brains behind the brilliant, resource-heavy 
site for avant garde poetry, sound poetry, visual ("concrete") poetry, 
experimental film and music, Ubuweb ( www.ubu.com ) with some of the 
best free ( film, sound, etc) downloads around. This is is week-long 
blog for the Poetry Foundation, one of the oldest, most hallowed, 
moss-encrusted institutions / journals for poetry in the US. Goldsmith 
happily describes himself as "the most boring writer that has ever lived".

But the question for me is, what next after this? Do we see these 
experiments in text as the final limit and retreat back, or go beyond 
them? I like Goldsmith's idea for his students that these practices 
should be seen as part of a toolkit, which is then put to *use* in 
various ways. [Even though he seems to see that as second prize.] How do 
we make use of these practices? I do not buy the avant-garde defence 
that these experiments will "by themselves", by their very formal 
existence, bring about change. In fact, despite the extremity and daring 
of these poetic experiments, they also conceal, like much experimental 
art, a deeper *"safeness"*, which actually prepares them nicely for 
gradual incorporation into the institutions and practices of power. 
(Andy Warhol left a legacy picked up, in circular fashion, by 
contemporary advertising; Goldsmith is a well-couched professor at the 
University of Pennsylvania; Christian Bok's project has received 
thousands of dollars in funding because it does not, eventually, as far 
as I can see, pose any fundamental challenge to the discipline of 
biology, and because it has many mainstream applications.)


For a quick read, here are some excerpts from this blog:

*(From "Tuesday")*

"I teach a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative 
Writing,” which is a pedagogical extension of my own poetics. In it, 
students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and 
creativity. Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, 
repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. 
Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously 
become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe 
environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness."

*(From "Wednesday")*

"Contemporary writing requires the expertise of a secretary crossed with 
the attitude of a pirate: replicating, organizing, mirroring, archiving, 
and reprinting, along with a more clandestine proclivity for 
bootlegging, plundering, hoarding, and file-sharing. We’ve needed to 
acquire a whole new skill set: we’ve become master typists, exacting 
cut-and-pasters, and OCR demons. There’s nothing we love more than 
transcription; we find few things more satisfying than collation."

[...]

"The writer’s solitary lair is transformed into a networked alchemical 
laboratory, dedicated to the brute physicality of textual transference. 
The sensuality of copying gigabytes from one drive to another: the whirr 
of the drive, intellectual matter manifested as sound. The carnal 
excitement from supercomputing heat generated in the service of poetry."

*(From "Thursday")*

"I am the most boring writer that has ever lived. If there were an 
Olympic sport for extreme boredom, I would get a gold medal. My books 
are impossible to read straight through. In fact, every time I have to 
proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep 
repeatedly. You really don’t need to read my books to get the idea of 
what they’re like; you just need to know the general concept.

[...]

"John Cage said, 'If something is boring after two minutes, try it for 
four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. 
Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.'"

On *"Friday"* of this blog, you'll find descriptions and links for a 
number of pieces. For me, the more interesting are by Caroline Bergvall 
(also a poet interested in performance-- see link ), Emma Kay, Christian 
Bok, and Kenneth Goldsmith's own "Traffic". Christian Bok is the author 
of the very nice Eunoia, probably the only bestseller of avant-garde 
poetry in recent times. This particular project, the Xenotext 
Experiment, is the most extreme and deeply amoral of all. If this is 
something that is really going to happen, I'll hold my comments until I 
see it, since it seems unstoppable.

Vivek